President Barack Obama’s Republican adversaries piled on the criticism on Friday after he turned the overnight Dallas police massacre into a political platform – and then grinned from ear to ear as he reconnected with world leaders at a NATO summit in Poland.

Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron, both on their way out of office soon, seemed in a particularly light-hearted mood despite the day’s grim and dominant subject matter.

The pair laughed and joked with fellow leaders as they posed for a group picture and yukked it up as photographers kept snapping.

Hours earlier Obama had sermonized about the deaths of five police Texas police officers upon landing in Warsaw, saying that ‘when people are armed with powerful weapons, unfortunately it makes it more deadly and more tragic.’

‘And in the days ahead we are going to have to consider those realities as well.’

Retired surgeon Ben Carson, a former Republican presidential contender and current Donald Trump cheerleader, lit into him within hours and dismissed renewed calls for gun control legislation.

‘Now is definitely not the time to get political,’ Carson said on the ‘Fox & Friends’ program. ‘Now is the time to use logic and ask ourselves, “Why do we have a Constitution? Why do we have a Second Amendment?”‘

‘They’re always saying, “You don’t need a high powered weapon to hunt deer”,’ Carson continued. ‘The Constitution is not about deer hunting. It’s about people being able to defend themselves from an overly aggressive government or an external invasion.’

Carson told the Fox audience that if he were president, he would ask Americans instead to ‘imagine 24 or 48 hours with no police – what would your life be like?’

Thursday night’s murders followed two high-profile shooting deaths of black men by police in Louisiana and Minnesota. One officer was white, the other Asian-American.

‘Yes, there are some bad apples,’ Carson acknowledged. ‘And yes, we will find ways to deal with them. But in no way do we indict the entire police force.’

Meanwhile on MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe,’ Texas Republican Rep. Pete Sessions – another Trump backer – attacked Obama for exhibiting ‘weakness’ by not being at home in the U.S. while the dust settled on a national tragedy.